Hold Our Nerve

It has never been proved about Dawn Sturgess, and the question marks are enormous around Ivan Kivelidi and Zara Ismailova, so no one is ever known to have died of Novichok poisoning. Certainly, no one outside Russia ever has. Kivelidi is the only intended target who may even possibly have been killed by what therefore seems like an awful waste of money. Why not just use a gun? 

If Alexei Navalny was poisoned, then he was not poisoned in Germany, or anywhere else in NATO. Angela Merkel's attempt to rally NATO as if this had been in any way an attack on it is yet another reason to pull out of that club of Turkish Islamists and of Eastern European neo-Nazis. They are soon to be joined by more of the latter, and by Latin American caudillos. 

The white, red and white flag of 1940s collaboration is out on the streets of Belarus to demand accession to NATO and the EU. Compare the entirely different coverage of Alexander Lukashenko and of the pro-EU Milo Đukanović of Montenegro, who has already taken his country into NATO.

Even accepting that there might be something in this Novichok business, then it is obviously not deterred by Trident. Since the State has as much of its own currency as it chooses to issue to itself, take the £205 billion cost of Trident that is cited by CND, round it up to £210 billion, and then give an extra £70 billion to each of the Royal Navy, the British Army, and the Royal Air Force. 

This would be within a context in which military force itself would be used only ever in self-defence, while BAE Systems had been renationalised as the monopoly supplier to our own Armed Forces, with a ban on all sale of arms abroad, and with a comprehensive programme of diversification in order to preserve the skills that were currently employed in the arms industry.